Act Your Age

Posted on May 3, 2022 by hessd

This phrase is an appeal to widespread knowledge and consensual values about how a person of a certain age should act. In a time where both widespread knowledge and consensual values are in decline, you would think that sentiments like this would seem oddly dated. Do parents still say things like this?

There are reasons to undermine the whole structure of the question. The emphasis we have now placed on the unique individual clearly have no use for “age based norms of behavior.” There has to be a way “one should act” at a certain age for the whole “act your age” thing to make any sense. That way is under serious threat.

Another reason is the rise of therapeutic language and the perspectives on human behavior that surround it. In an episode of Doc Martin that Bette and I watched recently, a dreadfully willful and undisciplined kid goes around the village scratching the paint of cars parked on the street. The father explains that the boy is just exploring his ambivalent feelings about authority. [1]

On the other hand, excuses like “boys will be boys” apply the “act your age” dictum in the other direction. The shield here is, “They ARE acting their age.” So…this kind of behavior is so common among boys that age that it should be expected and therefore not “abnormal.” If it is common, it is normal. If it is normal, it is acceptable. That goes downhill fast.

So we can, as these paragraphs indicate, undercut the whole rationale of “act your age,” but that’s not why I introduced the topic. I introduced the topic because I am an old man and I live in a senior center and the implications that flow from “act your age” are a different kind of thing entirely here. How does an old man or an old woman go about acting their age?

I’d venture to say that most of the men who live at HPP [2] have had sports team experience. There is a kind of banter that is normal in locker rooms. People who use that language are accepted as part of the team and those who don’t have an extra hurdle to get over. Trust me on that. If a group of men at HPP found themselves using that old sports-based language, it would be disapproved of—and not just by the women.

But we are looking here at the basis for that disapproval. Would these men be admonished to “act their age?” I think so. They could be reproved for being racist or sexist or ageist or whatever young men delight in, but that would be a morally heavy charge and we do all have to find a way to live together here. That is why I an age-based criticism might be chosen. “Sure high school athletes talk that way among themselves, but you aren’t high school athletes anymore.”

I think gendered patterns of interaction might meet the same fate. There are, roughly speaking, three groups at HPP as they bear on this question. There are men and women who still notice and appreciate gendeer differences. There are men who prefer the company and conversational style of men and women who, similarly, prefer to be with women. And there are those for whom noticing the difference at all has become burdensome.

If the norm is that old people just don’t notice (much less appreciate) gender differences, then an old man or an old woman who does notice and who does appreciate them, could be said not to be acting their age. “Age appropriate behavior” would then be defined as not noticing or not caring. It is “what old women and men are like.” Furthermore—once it has been formulated as a norm—it is what old women and men should be like.

That would mean that behavior that would have been unlikely even to be noticed at an earlier age—say the last third of a career—will be discrepant and worthy of comment. This could be taken as an affront by any man or woman who deny that a mutually enjoyable recognition of gender differences that have been treasured by both parties over a long life should be discarded on the grounds of age alone.

Once you move out of the developmental context—the “you shouldn’t be sucking your thumb any more now that you are X years old”—context. The whole standard gets a little fuzzier. Age-related norms are not as clear and the agreement about them begins to fray at the margins. There are so many other ways of criticizing behavior, that it seems a shame to use one so vulnerable to abuse.

Maybe “act your age” is not the kind of thing that should be said to old men and women.

[1] And, to raise another serious but unrelated problem, the father tells Doc Martin that Martin’s car insurance will pay for the damage so he has no reason to be offended by the child’s behavior.
[2] Just a convenience. Holladay Park Plaza in a senior center in Northeast Portland. There are roughly twice as many women as men and roughly ten times more Democrats than Republicans, especially recently.

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Time Spent With Old Friends

Posted on April 15, 2022 by hessd

I’ve lost track of how many times I have read parts, at least, of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. Yesterday, I caught something new in my reaction to a scene and I’d like to tell you about it. I’m not sure what reaction I am hoping for. I think, “Oh yeah, that happens to me, too” would be really good.

The point here is that when you read a story like this for the first time, you read very practically. There is a story being told, after all, and in Stephenson’s case a fantastic story. Let me just touch down at a few places to illustrate my point. I’ll give page numbers because I have them; it’s not because I don’t understand that different editions distribute the numbers differently.

Four guys have the job of pushing the turnstile that winds the huge clock in the tower. These same four guys since they became novices in the order. We learn that Jesry is a notorious heel-filcher. They put out a loaf of freshly baked bread and he is more likely than not to have ripped the heel off before anyone else can get to it.

This is the kind of reference J. R. R. Tolkien used so well. By referring to a “well-known reality”—everybody, apparently, knows Jesry’s affinity for bread heels— that has nothing at all to do with the plot, he suggests the depth and reality of the narrative background.

The first time I read that about Jesry, I filed it automatically as something about him I needed to know. This time, I paused only briefly to record that it was something about Jesry I already knew and also to make whatever connections occurred to me between that one trait and others described elsewhere. He is easily fascinated by new ideas, for instance, where Raz, the narrator, suffers from “fascination burnout.” By telling us those two things about Jesry, is he suggesting an impulse driven person or are these just to facts? That is not a first read kind of question, but when I go back and back, I wonder.

One of the running jokes is that an alien to Arbre (the planet on which all the action takes place) is named Jules Verne Durand. They never say he is French. There is no part of the book where it would not be a violation of time and space conventions to say that he is French. On the other hand the four guys who wind the clock hear him phonetically and Stephenson gives us what they hear phonetically. So the joke is shared between us and Stephenson, and passes right by all the characters.

Fraa Osa is giving a potent explanation of how overlapping loyalties work. It ends “…that unites us with the likes of Jules Verne Durand.”

“‘Say zhoost’,” (p. 838) answered the Laterran, (Laterre is what he calls his home planet) which we figured was his way of expressing approval.” Stephenson could have given us c’est juste and then had one of the brighter characters translate it for one of the dimmer characters, but that engages the characters. Stephenson wants it to be our joke; his and ours.

Similarly, in their spacesuit/spacecraft there is a controller with a mushroom shaped stick that could be moved in four dimensions. Durand called it (p. 785) a “joycetick.” The phonetic joke again.

Seeing the spacesuit/spacecraft for the first time, Durand proclaims, “The conception is moneyfeek (p. 775). That’s fun, but but it is more of the same kind of fun and Stephenson has more in mind for this one. Much more fun is the exchange later when everyone has been launched in space in their suits/craft and are communicating with bases on Arbre. Erasmus’s handler says, “I’m going to talk you through the process of unstrapping yourself from the S2-35B.” Erasmus replies, patiently, as I hear the line, “Up here, we call it a monyafeek.” (p. 812)

This is the communications specialist is a bunker somewhere on the surface of Arbre telling a user of the suit who is actually in combat, about his S2-35B only to have him pull battlefield rank and correct her. “It’s monyafeek,” he says. “Whatever,” she says.

Those are just for fun and are as good illustrations of the phenomenon as we need. But there is a really serious one that stopped me in my tracks the first time through and that I have luxuriated in every subsequent time.

On page 804, Erasmus is chasing a nuclear reactor he needs to catch before it hits the atmosphere and burns up. His friends see him going further and further away and presumably, make a decision about what to do. We know this only from Erasmus’s thoughts.

“They’d probably watched me drifting away, with mounting anxiety, and debated whether to send a rescue team. But they hadn’t….If it had been anyone else, I wouldn’t have been able to read their minds nor they mine. But my fraas [fellow scholars] had been raised, trained by Orolo. They had figured out that in forty-five minutes, the nuke would reappear on the other side of Arbre. Just as important, they were relying on me—entrusting me with their lives—to figure out the same thing and to act accordingly.”

Raised together under the same master thinker; working together all their lives on the clock winding project, they had reached a place where they could confidently bet their lives that each understood the other.

Wouldn’t you want to wander back through that scene now and again? I do.

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Disordered Individuals

Posted on April 12, 2022 by hessd

Here is the text for today. I found this in an article in JAMA Psychiatry by Peter Sterling and Michael L. Platt (February 2022).

“Every symptom of despair has been defined as a disorder or dysregulation within the individual.”

First, at the risk of casting myself as the good guy in the drama I am about to sketch, I want to tell you how I was thinking of my depression in 2003, the very understandable reaction to my wife’s death. I was coping as best I could; doing the things that had to be done, maintaining the network of relationships that I hoped would be more meaningful later. A friend called to check on me and asked, as part of the conversation, whether I was taking anti-depressants.

That’s the first time that option had occurred to me. An awful loss had occurred in my life and I was depressed as a result. I said that I was not taking them. He asked why not. So I had to stop and think about it again. I answered, finally, that I didn’t think I was any more depressed than I ought to be. After a little further thought, I said I was on the track to recover, eventually, and had every hope of following that track back to health.

That story puts me at the other end of the continuum than the one Sterling and Platt are characterizing. Over at that end of the spectrum, every symptom of despair is defined as a disorder. So I would have had “a depression disorder” and would presumably have been given treatment. [1]

But Sterling and Platt are making a social critique. They are not concerned about my mourning my wife. Their idea is that our society is hell-bent, for its own reasons, on “medicalizing” anxiety, depression, anger, psychosis, and obesity. I’m sure they did not intend that as a complete list.

They suggest that one of the things wrong with this tendency is that it “incorrectly frames the problem.” [2] They have in mind that the issues represented by this list are not only “not medical problems,” but are not even “personal problems.” But that formula won’t work either.

The physical, the personal, and the social are intertwined and there is no use pretending they are not. Let’s take the time for two radically simple metaphors, then come back to the problem. Which setting in a three number combination is most important? You can tell by looking at it that it is a silly question, but when you start to say just why it is silly, it gets slippery.

Football example: the other team has a truly gifted receiver. No one defender on our team can stay with him. Here are three things we can do. We can make our defender faster. We can double cover this dangerous receiver. We can reduce the quarterback’s time for finding the receiver in coverage. Not only is it true that every one of those solutions would work, but it is also true that the weakness of one can be compensated for by the strength of the others.

OK. Back to reality.

Why is our society experiencing a spike in obesity and diabetes? It’s a lot of bad dietary choices. It is the socialization of those choices into socially confirmed practices. It is the food policy of the country, which makes healthful food inaccessible or expensive and unhealthful food readily available and cheap. Note the three levels.

The locker combination example shows us that getting two of those three issues right is not going to open the lock. The football example shows that you can compensate for the weakness in any one element by increasing the strength of the other two. Seems obvious. So why don’t we do that? As the choices move away from the individual—or in physical health examples—the individual’s body—they get more expensive and more conflictful.

It is (relatively) inexpensive for an intact family to teach the children to prefer the kinds and amounts of food that will serve them well. [3] Building a youth culture that will affirm, at best, or at least not punish, good food choices is somewhat more complex and expensive. Making sure the food is available so its choice can be affirmed by the kids is most expensive of all and most strongly opposed. There is a reason the U. S. government is stockpiling, by estimates I have seen recently, 1.4 billion pounds of cheese.

I should have brought most of you along so far as agreeing that the sound dietary choices of the individual are the cheapest and most secure approach to this problem. But somebody is going to have to look at the McGiganticburger ads and the popcorn chicken ads and say, “That’s bad for us. Let’s say no to that.” When that decision has been made and when it is stable, it is inexpensive as well. But how does it get made?

And particularly, how does it get made when “freedom” has been made into the hottest word in the political vocabulary and given as its principal content, “You can’t tell me what to do!” In the otherwise inoffensive line above—“Let’s say no to that!”—somebody is obviously telling somebody else what to do. It helps, in this example, that someone can say “We…” but as soon as some stable part of society or government gets’s involved, “we” becomes “them.” Then the cost skyrockets.

Finally, note that no one in the example I am offering, is making any money on the good food choices program. The kids are not, the families are not, the society is not. [4] The medicalization strategy, on the other hand, is a money making machine and the money is made in the short term by identifiable groups and individuals.

The football equivalent would be to put one team—only one—on stimulants and thereby increase their physical competence during the game. But that sound like a cheap substitute for good football decisions and good strategy. And it is

[1] Three years later, I did have a depressive disorder and was only too happy to have the help SSRIs gave me until I was out of it.
[2] I am not a fan of that way of framing the problem either, but I am also not a fan of the notion of a “correct” framing of the problem. It seems much better to me to think of them as useful or useless; helpful or harmful, etc.
[3] Of course, it isn’t cheap to have an intact family.
[4] There are cost for not doing these things, of course, but they show up later and that makes it very dicey for elected politicians.

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I’ve got more important things to do.

Posted on April 10, 2022 by hessd

Surely I do. I must.

That would, at least, make sense of the way I eat. I’ve been puzzled about this for awhile. I eat in a decision-minimizing way. Here are some of the obvious implications.

First, I eat/drink things in the unit sizes they come in. I drink “a cup” of coffee, for instance, and I might have that (I’m at Starbucks, anyway) with “a bagel” and “a package of cream cheese.” The opening bell rings and I start the project. I keep on drinking the coffee until I’m done; I keep on eating the bagel until I’m done. I do make an exception with the cream cheese. Even though it comes in a package (1.5 oz), I use only as much of it as necessary to grease the path of the bagel. [1]

It took me a little while to think of an alternative. It is “some.” So rather than drinking “a cup” of coffee, I drink “some” coffee. That doesn’t eliminate the problems, of course, but it does change their form slightly. But back to the solution side. I could eat “some bagel;” obviously just how much bagel is not specified. That would be the point of the change.

The same logic flows from “a steak” or “a sandwich” or “a beer.” If the project is to eat/drink “it” and “it” comes in an amount that has no necessary relationship to how much I want at the moment, then I would have to make decisions that are independent of the packaging, rather than consenting to the decisions that are implicit in the packaging. And whose decisions were those, I might ask in an idle moment.

Sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it?

You might think that I am inventing a problem just for the pleasure of solving it, but that is not really the case here. The easy way to deal with this is to eat when you are hungry and to stop when you are no longer hungry. And for people who are tuned to those feelings, that it, I agree, a perfect solution. It doesn’t feel like “making decisions” any more than “deciding” when you have scratched an itch long enough feels like a decision. You just stop at the right time without ever making anything you would call a “decision.”

That’s not how I do it. It is not how I have ever done it. The food winds up on my place—packaged or served—and the bell announcing the beginning of the project sounds (I am imagining the bell, of course) and I start moving toward the finish line. It’s not fast or slow by definition; but it is complete or not yet complete. Sounds pathological, doesn’t it?

What I feel I get from this is the freedom to think my own thoughts or to engage in whatever conversation I am in. I am free from the intrusive stream of questions I would otherwise have to be asking: am I still hungry, what do I feel like eating more of, did that do the job, should I keep on eating/drinking? [2]. I am free to have whatever internal conversation I am having or to participate in whatever social conversation I am having untroubled by the need to make all these decisions. As I implied in the title, I must think I have other things to do that are very important.

This plethora of decisions is replaced by the much simpler, “Am I done yet?” This question is cued up nicely for me by the unit. Have I finished “the sandwich?” is easy; “have I eaten enough sandwich?” is hard. “Have I drunk my cup of coffee?” is easy; “Have I had all the coffee I want right now?” is hard.

I must think that what I would otherwise be doing is incredibly important for me to accept all the costs of not deciding things. That’s not how I experience it, of course. In full project mode, I just begin and make progress and complete the project (the food is gone) with no unnecessary distractions.

It’s sad, really, but it would be a lot of work to change.

[1] This is not as different as you might think from what I would do at home if there were a dish of cream cheese on the table. I would put an amount on my plate and from then on, it would be just like the package. That is how much “there is to eat.”
[2] I see that I am bypassing all questions of whether the tastes and textures are pleasant and interesting. Those are important and I do attend to them, but they don’t help me with the decisionmaking stresses, so I am passing them by this time.

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Toxic Masculinity

Posted on March 29, 2022 by hessd

Today, I want to think about the expression “toxic masculinity.” [1]. I have three major goals in writing this essay. The first is not to whine about the expression. The second is to try to persuade you that I am not whining about the expression. And finally—at last, something of substance—to look at the place that kind of designation has in our language. This last observation is only about what “toxic” adds to the expression and how that could be improved.

And since the first two are matters of style, I will begin on the third one and you can draw your own conclusions about the first two.

The adjective “toxic” adds nothing of value to the noun “masculinity” as both words are currently used. It would be very helpful if toxic masculinity were the name of one end of the scale of “kinds” or “forms” of masculinity. Unfortunately, that would require a name for the other end of the scale and that is where the expression, in current debate, comes up short. There is no useful name for “the kind of masculinity everyone approves of.”

It is easy to think that non-toxic is the solution to the problem, but negation alone is not going to get this job done. Imagine, for instance, that we were talking about shyness. We have no trouble saying that one person is shy and the other outgoing. “Outgoing” gives us a positive notion of what we are talking about. It is easy to imagine gradations of “outgoingness” or of “shyness” (it works either way) because both are acceptable values and each has its own merit.

That is why “shy” and “non-shy” doesn’t help. It doesn’t answer the question “What characteristics are you thinking about when you say, non-shy?” To which, a good answer might be, “If I knew that, why would I say non-shy?”

Why indeed?

The notion of what men are supposed to be like has not taken on any particular form yet. The notion of what men should be like, which was much more stable when society was more stable, is now in rapid flux. We really don’t know what we want men to be like—men don’t know either—so we are having trouble coming up with a name for the other pole.

This is a problem only at the general level. We have no trouble admiring a particular man. There are virtues [2] that are not sharply gendered. There are ways of being a man that everyone in the setting agrees are just right for that setting or for the marriage or for the group of men friends of which he is a part. The problem comes in talking about masculinity in general. [3]

This is a problem that has no obvious solution. It is not hard to design one. Get a broad agreement among the most powerful stakeholders about what a good contemporary masculinity ought to look like. Define it so that there many kinds of behaviors that are seen as part of the same general notion. Sell that notion of masculinity by all the relevant channels until it is so broadly understood that people can refer to it without stopping for redefinitions.

I don’t want to speculate about how likely that is. I am saying only that it is the way all the other new ideas are sold, so why not? Also, what else is there?

Finally, I notice that more and more I am finding troubles with evaluative scales that have only one active pole. The dynamics are that if there is only one pole and it is good, you get as close to it as you can. If it is bad, you get as far away from it as you can. And all the other values—the existence of which we take for granted when we are talking about normal scales of value—disappear. All the things you lose by getting as close as possible to the good pole or as far as possible from the bad pole simply go out of focus. Or go away. That’s just crazymaking.

Every strategic choice, and this includes linguistic choices, needs to be justified on the grounds that it provides more benefit than harm. That means that the effect on many valued entities needs to be kept in mind. And that means that the kind of unipolar linguistic construction that produced “toxic masculinity” needs to be rejected.

[1] It just occurred to me how jarring it would be to abbreviate it as ™ and even more so to develop an organization named T.M. and to trademark that name as T.M.™
[2] Etymologically, a “virtue” is “a manliness.” The Latin vir is the source of all such words. That is why it always takes my mind an extra tick or so when I hear or read of a woman “losing her virtue.” I know what is meant, of course, but the etymological shadow cast on her losing her manliness just takes me a little longer to process.
[3] “Femininity” has the same problem, of course. The virtues of gender roles at a time when definitions and preferences are changing so rapidly. Still, I note that no one has bothered to invent a “toxic feminism.”

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It’s not a flaw. It’s a feature

Posted on February 23, 2022 by hessd

We sang a hymn this past Sunday I had never sung before.[1] I did pretty well in the first stanza but I hit a serious speed bump in the second. It goes like this:

“Teach us, O Lord, your lessons
as in our daily life
we struggle to be human
and search for hope and faith…”

That seems like a odd thing to sing in church, where the state of being human is the problem that is solved by God’s grace. Colloquially, “we’re only human” is a way of dismissing a fault of some sort, so that fault = human and vice versa.

Christian theology begins with our “fallen nature.” It is the first part of the story our faith tells. I’m currently working on a way to represent the book of Romans as a series of arguments Paul is making. The argument about what being human is like starts at 1:18, as soon as the preliminaries are over.

18The retribution of God from heaven is being revealed against the ungodliness and injustice of human beings who in their injustice hold back the truth.

There is a charge, “hold back the truth;” there is a guilty party, “human beings;” and there is a response from God, “retribution.”

This case goes on until 3:21. That’s 65 verses of pretty dense prose.

21God’s saving justice was witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, but now it has been revealed altogether apart from law: 22God’s saving justice given
through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.

What a piece of work is man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals.

There is a solution which addresses the problem Paul has identified. It is “God’s saving justice (“the righteousness of God” in the King James that I grew up with”) then a means, “through faith in Jesus Christ.”

That’s a long argument. It begins very broadly describing the great flaw of human beings (we hold back the truth) and continues on to how God is dealing with this flaw (“saving justice through faith”).

We say this every Sunday at several places in the service. It not just the confession that we all read from our bulletins. It is the explicit teaching of the hymns generally, of the liturgy generally, and of the homilies most of the time.

Given that, it is not an oddity, really, that I was surprised to learn that our great struggle is to be human. This is the classic case of “It’s not a flaw; it’s a feature.”

A New Standard

The idea that being human was a goal rather than a deeply flawed condition probably dates, in western thought, from the Renaissance. The Renaissance didn’t celebrate the provision for the salvation of humankind, as the Church did, but rather it celebrated humankind as such. The Prince of Denmark in Hamlet makes the classic case:

What a piece of work is man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals.

Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2

God is cast, in this scenario, as part of the applauding audience. For those who achieve true humanity, God can only approve in this model. Again, I don’t object to the model. You can hardly read the classic texts in philosophy and history without taking it for granted.

It is not the way the church has looked at it, however, and I don’t think we should start now.

[1] This in a old mainline Presbyterian church in Portland, Oregon. We are not a hotbed of doctrinal innovation. On the other hand, we don’t always pay attention to what we are saying.

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The Beauty of Pravic Verbs

Posted on February 12, 2022 by hessd

“Still working?” she said as she passed.

“Do you ever get a break?” he said, fifteen minutes later.

Things like this happen for two reasons. I sit and type next a place where a lot of people walk. This of it as a front porch, except that people walk between the porch, where I am, and the house. And then, they don’t really know what I am doing. And it is hard to tell them. [You see the basic structure of the “porch” in the picture below.]

Ursula LeGuin and I have a favorite book of hers. It is The Dispossessed, in which an unassimilable minority is shipped off to a habitable moon and set up as a separate civilization on the condition that they never come back. The people on the planet Urras are “archists;” the people they sent away to the moon, Anarres, are anarchists. You see the problem. [1]

Because the anarchists were very wise people, they understood that the language they all spoke had the values of archism buried in it, so to begin a culture on a new basis, they would have to invent a new language. Which they did. They called it Pravic.

In Pravic, the same verb means both work and play. The founding linguists wanted a language that would enable them to say that meaningful work was restorative in the same way that playful behavior was restorative. The also invented a noun to refer to meaningless routine work; they called it kleggich.

If English has a verb that meant working/playing, it is the word I would use to tell passersby what I am doing on my “front porch.” As you can see by the picture, the front porch is like a long lobby on the other side of the hall from our apartment. When we first moved in, I referred to it as “an extra living room;” then as a parlor (where one would parlez). But my daughter, Dawne, who lives in New Jersey and knows how front porches are used, said, “That’s not a living room. That’s a front porch.” And so it has been, in our family’s language, ever since.

I write three kinds of things out there on my front porch. I keep up a correspondence with friends; I write a blog; I write materials for one or the other of the three bible studies—two secular, one Christian—I teach. The really odd thing about that combination of working/playing activities is that what I write gravitates back and forth from one medium to another. Some years ago, for example, I wrote a series of posts on the steps that seemed to me to be either named or implied in the “redemption” of an Israelite from slavery. Those four “posts” are now the centerpiece of a course on the history of the idea of redemption that I will be teaching to one of the secular Bible studies this spring. Because I have friends who are interested in that idea, I ship it off to them, counting on them to act as critics and editors—coauthors, really, although I wouldn’t say that to them.

That array of things—the subjects, the settings, the dialog with passersby—are why I really couldn’t settle on working/playing and why I could use a really good Pravic verb, which LeGuin never actually names. Last week, for example I wrote the current installment in a course I am offering at our church—this is the religious course, not either of the two secular ones—on how Matthew handles Mark’s account of the life of Jesus. The image I am pushing (I know it is anachronistic, but it is clear) is that Matthew is sitting at his desk writing his gospel. He is cribbing substantial parts of Mark’s account in the process and he has that account there on the desk.

He adds some things, he subtracts some things, he changes the order of other things, he tidies up the grammar quite a bit. In last week’s session, for instance, we dealt with Mark’s account of the healing of the woman who had “an issue of blood.” In the middle of the crowd, she managed to touch some part of Jesus’ robe and was instantly cured. Jesus stopped on the spot and said, “Who touched me?” In Mark, the disciples treated that as a dumb question. Who would muscle through a Middle Eastern bazaar crowd and ask who had touched him? Matthew has no use at all for that kind of attitude toward Jesus, so he just drops that whole element of the story. The woman comes up; there is no crowd; Jesus asks no dumb questions; the woman is healed. End of story. But note that you have to start with Mark to see that Matthew has dropped anything at all.

We paired that story with a similar one, just a little later in both accounts, in which Jesus healed the demon-possessed child of a gentile woman. Again, Matthew alters the account he gets from Mark, but both accounts have Jesus referring to the woman as a “dog”—not one of the children of the house, who would be Jews. Even thought I knew the story, I prepared myself for the woman to take issue with the ethnic slur. [2]

But that made her the second woman in this session who “had an issue”—think back to the first woman—so I called the essay, “Two women with issues.” And then I tried to get back to work, but I had to stop from time to time because I just couldn’t seem to stop laughing.

At that point, one of my neighbors wandered by and asked, “What are you working on?” And that made me laugh even harder. There’s never a Pravic verb around when you need it.

[1] It is actually two problems. The archists problem is how to get rid of those who will not admit the legitimacy of force by the state. The anarchists problem is to built a functioning culture in which there is not state to enforce cooperation.
[2] In fact, if you don’t know the story, she accepted the slur at face value and presented her issues with the implications Jesus had drawn. The two issues, as I now see them are: a) is there a necessary temporal delay between feeding the children and feeding the dogs and b) does feeding the dogs necessarily take anything from the children? Real issues, thoughtfully (and successfully) presented.

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The Anger of the Bypassed Classes

Posted on February 10, 2022 by hessd

Some of the links available in Thomas B. Edsall’s column in the New York Times yesterday have moved me to try to envision a broader political landscape for the U. S. I don’t know if this is sophisticated or naive. I know it can’t be both.

I do know that it isn’t very satisfying from a finger-pointing point of view and I take that as a good sign.

I am accustomed to saying that people who harbor unreasonable prejudices against black people in the U. S. are racists and are to be deplored. I don’t want to go away from that as an importnat premise, but today, I don’t want to start there. I want to start here. (You will see this paragraph again at the end of the argument)

Many of the U.S. counties that moved toward Trump in 2016 and 2020 experienced long-run adverse economic conditions that began with the 2000 entry of China into the World Trade Organization, setbacks that continue to plague those regions decades later.


But even before that, there was NAFTA, which hardly needs to be spelled out anymore, but which is the North American Free Trade Agreement. Here is the citation and the conclusion from Edsall’s article.
“In “Local Economic and Political Effects of Trade Deals: Evidence from NAFTA,” Jiwon Choi and Ilyana Kuziemko, both of Princeton, Ebonya Washington of Yale and Gavin Wright of Stanford make the case that the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 played a crucial role in pushing working class whites out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party:


“We demonstrate that counties whose 1990 employment depended on industries vulnerable to NAFTA suffered large and persistent employment losses relative to other counties. These losses begin in the mid-1990s and are only modestly offset by transfer programs. While exposed counties historically voted Democratic, in the mid-1990s they turn away from the party of the president (Bill Clinton) who ushered in the agreement and by 2000 vote majority Republican in House elections”.

What do these changes mean? Here are three things they mean. David Autor and his colleagues specifically cite:


“an ideological realignment in trade-exposed local labor markets that commences prior to the divisive 2016 U.S. presidential election.” More specifically, “ trade-impacted commuting zones or districts saw: a) an increasing market share for the Fox News Channel, b) stronger ideological polarization in campaign contributions and c) a relative rise in the likelihood of electing a Republican to Congress.”
So there is the structure of the problem as I am trying it on today. The internationalization of trade (as opposed to protectionism) hit a certain segment of the U. S. population very hard. Autor et. al. call these “trade-impacted…districts.”

It not only reduced their incomes; it reduced their prospects. Thus, according to Katherine Russ et. al.,

“…trade induced economic downturns “affect entire communities, as places with the lowest fractions of high-school or college-educated workers are finding themselves falling with increasing persistence into the set of counties with the highest unemployment rates.”


So here’s where they are:
“Eroded social standing, the loss of quality jobs, falling income and cultural marginalization have turned non-college white Americans into an ideal recruiting pool for Donald Trump — and stimulated the adoption of more authoritarian, anti-immigrant and anti-democratic policies.”

And not only that, but:

“Lea Hartwich, a social psychologist at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies at Osnabrueck University in Germany wrote in an email:


“Those falling behind face a serious threat to their self-worth and well-being: Not only are the societal markers of personal worth and status becoming unattainable but, according to the dominant cultural narrative of individual responsibility, this is supposedly the result of their own lack of hard work or merit.”

So the “societal markers” of personal worth and status are severely eroded and, even worse, according to the dominant cultural narrative of individual responsibility—which they themselves insist on—all this is their fault.


Finding Scapegoats.


So let’s review. This identifiable group of voters has had a really rough time since and because of the internationalization of trade. They have lost income and status and both those trends appear to be continuing for the foreseeable future. The group that has benefitted from these changes has made alliances with the groups these voters are accustomed to feeling superior to, so our losses are not only absolute, but also comparative losses.


These voters need someone to blame in the very worst way. Changing the issues defining our situation from economic to cultural seems like a good move. That means that the class that is benefitting from these changes and their “projects,” the people we have always thought of as below us, cannot be opposed in economic terms but there are lots of cultural terms available.


The effect of this culture war will be to ridicule the rising class above us, the managerial class, and to deplore the class below us, the even poorer whites, and the darker hued minority groups. Programs like Affirmative Action are perfect for that purpose because they are race-based systems of preference. The Black Lives Matter protests that keep getting out of hand are nearly ideal and, combined with Defund they Police, they are entirely ideal. The schools where these voters send their children are a hotbed of left-wing ideology.


And so on. These are Fox News watchers, if you remember the reference from David Autor and his colleagues, so justifications of these grievances are ready to hand and I have used some of the language here.


What should such a person do?


Here is where I started, you will recall.


“I am accustomed to saying that people who harbor unreasonable prejudices against black people in the U. S. are racists and are to be deplored. I don’t want to leave that as a valued premise, but today, I don’t want to start there. I want to start here.”

I started with changes in international trade and found up with “unreasonable prejudices against black people.” These easily visible prejudices are now seen as the last step in a long line of steps, none of which have been their choice. They can’t change the shift toward international trade and the skills that fit best with it. I can’t—“I” in that sentence is used to refer to the group of people who have been disadvantaged by the shift—acquire those skills myself and even if I could, the number of such jobs being shifted from human beings to robots will continue to grow. The groups below me are receiving unfair help from the groups above me and they are claiming these advantages as their right. The anger I quite naturally feel because I am ridiculed by those above me and reviled by those below me, needs to find an outlet of some sort.

The Republican party is cueing up a list of causes I can legitimately be angry about. They are offering me leadership that supports and frames my grievances as public policies. What have you got to offer me that can compete with that?

Some will say, of course, that I ought not to pursue my own welfare, but the welfare of the country, but that’s not what anyone else is doing. Every group I have named is out for personal benefits, whether moral credit or economic advantage, so I don’t think I ought to be the only one foregoing personal benefits of “the greater social good.”

What else have you got?

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Staying in Love

Posted on February 7, 2022 by hessd

I am going to argue today that it is possible and that for a certain kind of person—I am that kind of person—it is a really good idea. Now, during what my wife, Bette, and I call “the Valentine season” seems like a good time to try out the argument.

I will argue that it is not easy to stay in love, but first I would like to argue that it is hard to give a clear meaning to the phrase. That being the case, I would like to spend some time on what I do not want to convey by using it.

I don’t mean staying infatuated. I know from experience that the period of infatuation feels absolutely terrific. I know it doesn’t last all that long. I know that trying to get it to last longer than it should will fail and will feel bad. I know that making binding decisions under its influence is short-sighted at best. And I knew all that before I learned that the Latin at the heart of “infatuated,” was fatuus, which means “foolish.”

I don’t mean staying in lust. Nothing against lust. It is a wonderful component in a much more complex and satisfying relationship. It is virtually a language of its own. But it isn’t the whole relationship and when it is treated as if it were, it distorts other parts of the relationship, some of which are a good deal more important over the long haul. My idea of the ideal arc of married lust is that you are consumed by it, then you perform it confidently, then you remember it fondly together.

I don’t mean just “not violating” the real promises on which the relationship is based. I do mean really fulfilling, as opposed to just “not violating,” the promises on which the relationship is based, but that is a much more difficult idea. There are the formal promises, like the ones in the marriage ceremony. I am a fan of those promises [1] but there are other, crucially important but usually unarticulated, promises, which are at the heart. I discover only gradually what those promises were. I may learn how to say what they were before my wife does, but she knew them first. She knew when those promises were being kept and when they were not. For me, “really fulfilling” those promises requires that I know what they are—I know that is not true of everybody—and if she can’t tell me, I need to learn in all the other ways I learn.

And finally, I don’t mean simply doing the things that love requires. Loving anyone—this is much broader than the romantic mode—means wishing him or her well; it means doing what you can to support the hopes or, when necessary, to share the griefs. I came eventually to love my parents that way. I love my brothers that way. I love my kids that way.

When I talk about “staying in love,” I am talking about the kind of feeling that helps me do those things. It is fuel for the relationship; it isn’t the goal of the relationship. But it also feels really good.

Elements of Staying in Love

You might not have noticed, but in the last few paragraphs, some major distinctions were made. Here are two. When I talk about “being in love,” I am talking about emotions, not intentions. When I talk about those feelings as fuel, I distinguish what works as fuel for me from what might work as fuel for someone else.

That means that it is the function that unites the whole category and it is the particulars that have the desired effect on the lovers. And it is the particulars I know most about. Take this picture for instance. This was taken on our first actual date—the one after the introductory coffee at Starbucks. We had seen a movie and were wandering around the mall. I asked if she would mind if I took some pictures. She was fine with that. [2] This is the picture I wanted, but I was having a lot of trouble describing how I wanted her to pose for it. Where are the elbows, where are the hands, etc. She said, “I see what you’re getting at,” and put herself like this. This is exactly what I had in mind, but she got there by imaging what I might have wanted. I still get a lift out of that.

There is a lot of celebration of independence for women these days and very little celebration for marriage. And marriage, a good one anyway, is an interdependence tailored to the personalities of the partners. So she has devised a way to “perform” dependence now and then as a favor. These are the little gestures that used to be thought of as “good manners” and which, after a period of being vilified, [3]are now mostly ignored. We still do them because they still enact the “being in love” part of the relationship and in that way, they fuel all the other parts.

It might well be—I haven’t asked her—that she would prefer to do them herself, but that she offers me the chance to do them “for her” because she knows how it affects me. (I’m talking about seemingly inconsequential things like holding doors and seating her at a table.) If that is true, then pretending that I am doing it for her actually accomplishes doing it for us. The gift of these little performed courtesies is generous, assuming that they are done more for me than for her, and they are smart, too, because they fuel the relationship that is so important to us both.

One final example. Early in our relationship she asked me to read a book called The 5 Love Languages. I didn’t like it much on first glance, but eventually it occurred to me that if I could find out how she “hears” my love for her, I could speak it in the language she hears best. In all candor, I prefer to offer expressions of love in the language I like best. Who wouldn’t? But if these expressions are going to fuel the relationship, they are going to have to be heard and understood, so “what they are for” has to take priority over “the form I like best.”

For reasons that still baffle me, Bette “hears” love in what the book calls “acts of service.” Remember, as you mull this, that my helping her on with her coat is not a service to her. Her receiving it gracefully and with attention is an act of service to me. So what counts as acts of service to her? You wouldn’t believe it. It is things like keeping the table from always being a clutter of books and papers; it is like taking the garbage out; it is things like getting the dishes off the counter and into the dishwasher and then out of the dishwasher and into the cupboards.

It took me a little while, I confess, to get over the idea that doing all these chores were a way of earning expressions of love. I wouldn’t like them at all if I thought of they as buying something. I thought for a little while of old Laban switching brides on Jacob and then extorting another seven years of chores out of him so he could get the one he had actually chosen. That’s not the best part of the Jacob Cycle.

But eventually, it occurred to me that the gift is seeing “what needs to be done” the way Bette sees it. It is, in fact, exactly like her posing for the picture at the mall. She understood the picture I had in my mind and did that even when I couldn’t describe it. All these chores are just my understanding the picture she has in her mind and doing what I can to make it happen.

Am I right about that? Of course. It fuels “being in love” feelings in Bette which act as the fuel for the marriage. The marriage isn’t about the fuel. It’s about the destination (and also the journey, for those of you who are destination-phobic) but the relationship between having enough of the right kind of fuel and actually getting where you are trying to go—that relationship ought to be clear to everyone.

And finally, it is getting clear to me.

[1] My wife, Marilyn, was sick a long time before she died. We went through a lot of difficult things together and every now and then, she would say, “Do you remember that ‘in sickness and in health’ part of the vows? I think this is what they were there for.” She said it with a smile and she was right.
[2] Unlike a much earlier date, who responded to the idea as if I might want to post it on a Lost and Found bulletin board or at the Post Office.
[3] About a man holding a door for a woman, for instance, I remember the title of a paper given at a sociology conference: “The Hand That Holds the Doorknob Rules the World.” Pretty vivid, don’t you think?

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The Stupidity of Intellectuals

Posted on February 3, 2022 by hessd

I’m going to say a lot of bad things about intellectuals today so I might just as well take the trouble to identify myself as one right up front. I have had a lot of formal education and have spent more time teaching undergraduates than I have spent doing anything else since 1966. If I were going to have to make the case that I have contributed significantly to the academic consideration of some crucial issue or other, I would have to adopt a much higher standard. Also, I would fail to meet it. But the purpose of calling myself an “intellectual” today is just the share the blame implicit in the accusation I am going to make today.

So let’s start here. “Hi. My name is Dale. I’m an intellectual.”

This line of thought began innocently enough when Paul Krugman reported on Florida’s Senate Bill 148, which, as passed out by the committee, forbade the teaching of certain “divisive concepts.” Krugman added some examples, such as specifying the age of certain rocks as older than the best known biblical accounts would allow them to be.

My favorite “divisive concept” is the well-known conflict about whether Bud Lite ought to be drunk because it is less filling or because it tastes great. In the ads that featured this faux conflict, proponents prepare for, and in at least one one ad, engage in, physical conflict against “the other team.” The other team prefers the same beer, but for a different reason. Right.

Making “divisive concepts” illegal and the teaching of them a matter for prosecution is ridiculous. As an intellectual, I cite all the reasons why such an idea cannot really be taken seriously and then I retire, having done “the job.” That’s not stupid, but it is naive. Let me tell you why.

The Florida bill has nothing at all to do with “divisive concepts” like racial guilt or the legacy of exploitation of native peoples. The Florida bill is an attempt to change the subject from race or imperialism—as above—to how to prosecute unpopular ideas. We have apparently come a long was from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “freedom for the thought we hate” (1929). [1] A concept is used; some people take exception to it. It is (clearly) divisive. Now, in Florida, if this bill becomes law, the curriculum that contained such a concept may be changed and the professor who made use of it may be prosecuted.

The question that is answered by SB 148, therefore, is this: “How can we change the debate from the evidence available to support an idea like CRT, to the political penalties that may be assessed for using it in public?” It an idea put forth by some very savvy people that the conflict should be changed from one they will certainly lose to one they will certainly win.

Consider the possibilities

So Party A and Party B have a conflict. It must be resolved one way or another. What sort of mechanism should be used to resolve it?: Let’s imagine that it should be put up for a vote. That’s one way. It could be decided by a committee I control. That’s a second way. Or, as a third way, we could have a duel. Party A is better at pistols; Party B at swords. What kind of duel should be scheduled? Or, fourth and finally, they could consult the most knowledgeable people available, experts, and see if there is better support for A’s side or B’s.

In every one of these ways of “settling” the conflict, one party or another is advantaged. “The way the conflict is to be settled” and “who will win the conflict” are just two versions of the same question. And now we see why devices like SB 148 are so powerful. They pretend to be about an intellectual issue of some kind, but they are actually about changing the mode of resolution from one kind to another.

Here’s an example from Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, the best dystopian novel I know. Shevek is the name of the principal character.

“A man named Shevet came up to Shevek one night after supper. He was a stocky, handsome follow of 30. “I’m tired of getting mixed up with you,” he said. “Call yourself something else.

The surly aggressiveness would have puzzled Shevek earlier. Now he simply responded in kind. “Change your own name if you don’t like it,” he said.

“You’re one of those little profiteers [a socialist slur on capitalists] who go to school to keep his hands clear,” the man said. “I’ve always wanted to knock the shit out of one of you.”

“Don’t call me a profiteer,” Shevek said. But this wasn’t a verbal battle….When he woke up, he was lying on his back on the dark ground between two tents.”

Shevek’s instinct, like mine, was to dispute the accuracy of the derogatory term he had been called. Shevet was, in fact, mistaken about that. Shevek was no profiteer. He was an academic, however (clean hands) and that was what Shevet resented. An argument about what criteria should be used to determine “profiteer-status” and whether they truly applied to Shevek, is the kind of thing Shevek and I would have preferred.

Shevet, however, changed the kind of fight it was and beat Shevek senseless. They saw each other again from time to time, but the statement had been made and Shevet showed no further interest in Shevek at all. He had said what he wanted to say by beating the shit out of Shevek and Shevek had found no response to it at all. [2]

Nothing I have said so far establishes the intellectuals who participate in this charade as stupid. That’s the next step. I have as my model, the dog in the movie Up, who has one goal or another in mind but who can be instantly distracted by the word “Squirrel.” He doesn’t seem to be able to help himself. Possibly the dog is an intellectual.

Intellectuals ought to be able to do better. When an idea—the home field of intellectuals—is proposed, the intellectuals are attracted to it. We want to show that it is internally inconsistent or that it will be readily abused or that it can be shown to be untrue. And we will continue to make that case all the while the issue is being resolved in other ways in other settings. While one school board after another is taken over by candidates who oppose “divisive concepts,” we intellectuals continue to point out the inherent weakness of the idea. While on professor after another is fined or demoted or fired for using “divisive concepts” in class, we intellectuals continue to write journal articles for each other establishing the fundamental flaws in the concept itself.

That’s the part that is stupid.

I don’t think we ought to ignore stupid ideas. We ought to declare them to be wrong (in any of the hundreds of ways ideas can be wrong) and then change our focus to establishing how the conflict will be resolved. If it is going to be resolved by the courts, what will it take to win there? If at the polls, what will it take to win there? If by vigilante action against elected school boards, what will it take to win there? But we should not, under any circumstances, continue to argue the intellectual flaws of an idea that is winning by every other measure.

[1] In all fairness, that ringing phrase was lodged in a minority opinion in the United Sates v. Schwimmer. I didn’t mean to imply that it has ever been more than an aspiration of intellectuals.
[2] Shevek does find, as the character develops, a way to respond. It is not definitional and it is not physical, but it does drive the rest of the plot.

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